From the course: Photography Foundations: Night and Low Light

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Working with shutter speed in low light

Working with shutter speed in low light

From the course: Photography Foundations: Night and Low Light

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Working with shutter speed in low light

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Just as you cannot see as well in the dark, your camera has a more difficult time creating an image if you don't have enough light. Now, not enough light doesn't mean an image that's completely dark. Long before you get to full darkness, you'll encounter the problem of a scene that simply doesn't have enough light to show a level of detail that the viewer can make sense of. Now you determine how bright or dark your final images through your exposure controls: shutter speed, aperture, ISO. You should already be familiar with these and how they interrelate. But let's quickly review a couple of critical low-light concerns. As the shutter is open longer, moving objects in your scene will get blurrier and if you're shaking the camera at all, overall sharpness in your image will decrease, due to camera shake. Of course, leaving the shutter open longer is one of the ways that you can get more light onto the sensor. So in low light, you'll be battling this balance of a shutter speed that's…

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